Stumping candidate saves woman trapped under fridge for days

By M.S. ENKOJI
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Gray Allen poured his heart into his first political campaign, knocking on doors every day, sending out mailers.

But in the three-way race for a seat on the Placer County, Calif., Water Agency board last week, one of Allen's 6,109 votes came his way as the result of more than just standard stumping.

Inge Walen, 72, had been pinned under the refrigerator in her home for four days, she says, when Allen showed up on her doorstep seeking her support at the polls. Allen had planned to knock on doors in the Sun City neighborhood of Roseville that Sunday afternoon, but ended up launching a rescue effort that Walen believes saved her life.

And won her vote.

" Whenever someone saves your life, you got to pay them back somehow," said Walen, who is recovering from injuries at a Fair Oaks nursing home.

Sept. 24 was another day on the campaign trail for Allen, when he and his wife headed to the retirement community in Roseville. He knocked at Walen's door.

"I heard this faint cry of help and this thumping," said Allen, a 69-year-old former Roseville planning commissioner.

He told Walen's next-door neighbor, Jeanne Hollinsgworth, about the sounds. With her help, he found an open sliding door at the back of Walen's home.

"I couldn't believe my eyes," Allen said. "She's obviously a tough, willful lady."

Walen, who had fallen in and out of consciousness over the four days, was trapped up to her thighs under the fallen fridge, her back cut by broken glass.

She's not sure exactly how it happened, but she believes the refrigerator was unbalanced by a nearly empty lower compartment and a top-heavy freezer, she said. It toppled over on her.

Walen recalls not so much the pain, but the overwhelming sensation of confinement of her lower legs: She couldn't even wriggle a toe.

"I was thinking all the time, 'How do I get myself out of this pickle?' " she said.

She threw a large bag of frozen peas at a kitchen window, hoping to break the glass. It glanced off the double panes.

She stretched to reach into a drawer and grab an eggbeater to toss at the window. It bounced off and turned on the faucet, the sound of water torturous as she grew parched by the hour.

She sat up enough to wrench a burner off the stove top and threw that at the window. It fell and turned the water off.

Meanwhile, friends and family called, leaving messages she couldn't answer.

The retired bank branch manager, who golfs, is in a singing group and does water aerobics, is too busy to cause alarm among friends and family if she doesn't always answer the phone.

Though her children call weekly, they don't always get an answer, said her son Scott Walen, who lives in the Bay Area.

"I don't say, 'Oh, my God I got to rush up there, she might be under a fridge,' " he said.